AD REINHARDT FOUNDATION FOR ART AS ART
 

THE NEXT REVOLUTION IN ART

The next revolution in art will be the same, old, one revolution. Every revolution in art turns over art from art-as-also-something-else into art-as-only-itself.

The one, eternal, permanent revolution in art is always a negation of the use of art for some purpose other than its own. All progress and change in art is toward the one end of art as art-as-art.

An avant-garde in art advances art-as-art or it isn't an avant-garde.

Art-as-art is as old as art and artists. Artists have always practiced, if not always professed, secretly or openly, art-as-art as artists. Artists-as-artists have always worked the same way and have always made the same things.

Art-as-art is always a battle cry, polemic, picket sign, sit-in, sit-down, civil disobedience, passive resistance, crusade, fiery cross, and non-violent protest.

The artist-as-artist's first enemy is the philistine-artist, the "all-too-human" or subhuman or superhuman artist inside or outside or beside himself, the socially useful and usable artist, the artist-jobber and sales artist, the expressionist-businessman and "action" artist, the artist who "has to eat," who has to "express himself," and who lives off, on, in, for or from his art.

The artist-as-artist's second enemy is the art dealer who deals in art, the private collector who collects art, in other words, the public profiteer who profits from art.

The artist-as-artist's third enemy is the utilitarian, acquisitive, exploiting society in which any tendency to do anything for its own transcendental sake cannot be tolerated.

Art-as-art has always been and always will be a trouble for philosophers, priests, politicians, professors, patriots, provincials, property people, proud possessors, primitives, poets, psychiatrists, petit-bourgeois persons, pensioneers, patrons, plutocrats, paupers, panderers, pecksniffs, and pleasure-seekers, for the reason of art's own Reason that needs no other reason or unreason.



From a talk given by Ad Reinhardt in 1963.

© 2024 AD REINHARDT FOUNDATION
ARTASART@ADREINHARDT.ORG